The book's title accurately describes the select
texts under study but is unlikely to attract as wide of an audience
as it should. In Milton's Cambridge Latin: Performing the
Genres 1625-1632, John Hale provides a refreshing analysis
of the extant performative prose that John Milton (1608-1674)
penned in Latin during his Cambridge years, of obvious interest
to Miltonists and Latinists. But, Hale also provides readers
with an engaging sense of the lively role of performed Latin
to early modern English scholars, of equal importance to early
modern scholars, educational specialists, and those interested
in multi-lingual culture in general. Milton's texts serve, at
once, as well-appreciated, unique texts and as fascinating examples
for explanation of the larger educational, public, and linguistic
contexts.

Hale's tone inspires interest in subjects that
may be all too readily thought to be tedious. He conveys a great
deal of important information about both college and
university requirements in Milton's day and about the subtleties
of Latin usage inscribed in academic performances, especially
the puns on salting, the bilingual ritual when freshmen were
inducted to freshman status. Milton's Cambridge Latin
demands careful attention on the part of readers because so
much is conveyed in a compressed ­ yet thankfully appealing
­ style, perhaps mimetic of the very experience that Hale describes
of Milton's original Cambridge audiences. When Hale summarizes
that "Rhetoric was part of making the logic pleasing, entertaining"
(22), one cannot help but be pleased that he practices what
he states in his own writing.

Continually emphasizing the likely and implied
human interactions between speaker and audience in oral performance,
Hale dedicates the book's four parts to the genres of university
exercises, voluntaries, pieces for the college community, and
salting. One of Hale's greatest strengths is in defining and
signaling clearly the differences between genres. For example,
he moves from the first chapter on disputations to the second
on act verses by writing "Whereas his disputations evinced little
spirit of emulation, and did not extend or affect their genre,
his act verses show the exact opposite. He infuses this equally
set mode of philosophical expressions with considerable new
life" (33).

I am glad to have John Hale's Milton's Cambridge
Latin sitting on my bookshelf as a concise, engaging resource
on early modern English academic performances, especially because
they are Milton's of course. As the works of a highly influential
author, they can be readily integrated into classroom discussions
in courses that already include Milton: ideally, they can indeed
expand a return of interest in the worthy poet, appropriately
reframed thanks to Hale as an erstwhile, impressively-creative
Renaissance student. The book is invaluable for research on
multilingualism and on seventeenth-century academic practices.
In graduate classrooms, parts of the book could serve as nice
complements to Milton's Of Education (1644) or works
on public academic performances by Juan Luis Vives, Richard
Mulcaster, and others.

Milton's Cambridge Latin is an especially
strong resource for Comparative Literature research and classes.
The last part, "Part IV: Milton's Salting (Editio Princeps),
Text and Translation," is a fine exposition on translation theory
and practice. After graciously acknowledging the positive contributions
of the Tillyards' translations, Hale states of his own translation,
"The present version prints the extant text together, in its
original tongues, for the reader to read as a whole and consecutive
experience of what Milton did as the master of those 1628 [salting]
ceremonies" (240). The book ends with Latin transcriptions on
facing pages of Hale's English translations of the oration "In
Feriis […] jeventute," the prolusion "Laboranti, ut videtur,"
and "Anno Aetatis 19. At a Vacation Exercise." Footnotes
to both the Latin and English refer directly to grammatical
issues that display choices in translation, describe variants
in the early editions of the works, and explain the humour that
might be otherwise, well, lost in translation. The helpful footnotes,
the Latin and English on facing pages, and Hale's thorough enjoyment
of Milton's Latin works so clearly evinced in the preceding
parts inspired me to renovate my Latin skills, degenerated since
graduate school. The exercise was well worth the effort under
Hale's learned, balanced guidance.

Responses to this piece intended for the
Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.